Drawing from the Well
Queries Sent: 0
Total Queries: 35
Rejections: 9
Scenes Mapped: 0
Total Scenes: 315
Man! That Mystery genre post last night took forever to write. I didn’t realize how unskilled I was with it until I tried to write about it. This says to me that it would be good for my writing chops to write a mystery short story one day soon. Maybe after I finish mapping Book Two…
As you can see, putting that much time into the post with how many other errands I ran last night led to me doing no writing. However, my wife and I are taking a little overnight retreat tonight in the midst of our vacation so we can get some real work done with our respective businesses so let’s see how much I can write today.
Filling the Well
Bloodwitch: 39%
The Raven Boys: 90%
Guide to Literary Agents 2019: 26/332
I got a little reading done yesterday and it was great. Just as expected, the action is picking up nicely and elements are starting to click into place so that more of the story is visible. If I can understand it, I get more enthralled so I’m VERY happy to see this. More tomorrow.
Polishing the Well
Most of yesterday was spent running errands after a lovely breakfast with my love. This week, I’m getting a taste of what life could be like if I didn’t have a 9-to-5 job and wrote books as my only living. It’s pretty great, gives me something to look forward to down the line.
Well Chat
Hold Onto the Edge of Your Seat
This genre is so called because as the book/show/movie progresses, you are thrilled by where it goes and how unexpected the twists and turns are. You’re afraid for the protagonist and the situations they have to get themselves out of.
“Thrillers” cross over with many other genres to build their shtick. Sometimes there’s a mystery, sometimes it’s horror, sometimes it’s a turn on romance, believe it or not. The heart of a thriller is the thrill. Everything else is just peripheral. If you’re on the edge of your seat, biting your nails, holding your breath, and clenching the armrest, it’s probably a thriller.
So what are some categories of thrillers? There’s the mystery thriller where either something bad will happen or something bad has happened but something worse still could happen. You know what the “thing” that could happen is but you don’t know if it will happen or not. The mystery keeps widening and deepening and eventually takes a turn into a breakneck pace until the resolution. In Gone Baby Gone, there’s an abduction and either the protagonist will save the abducted little girl or not. In Silence of the Lambs, a serial killer is claiming victims AND taunting the protagonist until she finds him and the lights literally go out. See, it’s bad. In The Da Vinci Code the protagonist has to crack the code before a secret society escape with an ancient truth. There are lots of variations here.
Psychological thrillers can have a mystery tied into them, but their core is making you question everything by getting into your head (hence the “psychological” bent). Psychological thrillers typically cross over with psychological horror quite often. Are you ever more thrilled than when you’re afraid? Look up psychological thrillers on Netflix and you’ll find a myriad of choices. Any of M. Night Shyamalan’s early works will give you a good indication what this genre is all about, movies like The Sixth Sense, Signs, and Unbreakable.
Political thrillers, on the other hand, have more to do with, well, politics, obviously, but also some plot to either overthrow or undermine the government. There’s a mystery element here too that has to be uncovered, but the heart of it is in the politics and the implications of the bad guys getting their way. Dan Brown has a litany of these books as does Tom Clancy, though his are more in the spy thriller genre typically.
Lastly, there are Slasher films. Slashers? you ask. Yes. They have one foot in horror and one in thriller, so we’ll revisit them again in a few days. The thrill in this is trying to escape the killer and seeing how many people fall before the killer gets to the protagonist. Halloween, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Cabin Fever, and the list goes on and on. These are seeing a revival these days as old properties are being revived with reboots and bajillionth sequels. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen most. Modern slashers add in other elements like the Purge bringing in social commentary and Saw shows what happens when the antagonist has a point.
That’s enough thrilling for me for one day. How could you thrill your potential audience in your next work?
May the tide carry you to safer shores.
BSG